An Ancient River in Syria Sections Off a Modern War

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The near side of the Euphrates River near Manbij, Syria, is controlled by American-backed Kurdish-led forces. On the other side are Turkish-backed Arab rebels.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

ZOUR MAGHAR, Syria — On the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, Kurdish militiamen aligned with American troops burrow into sandbagged positions and eye their foes across the water.

On the other side, Arab rebels backed by Turkey shoot at anyone who nears the river.

For millenniums, the Euphrates has given farmers in the village of Zour Maghar water to irrigate fields of wheat, eggplant and sunflowers. Generations of families have sprawled on its banks for picnics, the older children teaching the younger to swim.

But after seven years of war, the river that has fed life in Syria’s parched east has become a hostile front, separating warring sides as it travels north to south. Deprived of its water, families have fled Zour Maghar, abandoning their mud-brick homes and leaving their fields idle.

“The river was everything for us,” said Muhammad Bozan, 35, a farmer who can no longer work his waterfront land. “We used to live from the river and now we can’t.”

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Members of a family picnic in their garden in Zour Maghar, a village on the Kurdish side of the Euphrates near the Turkish border. Behind them is a wall built this year by Turkish forces, and beyond that Turkey.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

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A pump in the Euphrates provides water for the region near Zour Maghar. South of that, the river becomes a battle zone, its water inaccessible.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Syria’s war has taken hundreds of thousands of lives, displaced millions and left entire cities in smoking ruins. It has also ensnared the Euphrates, an arc of the Fertile Crescent that is considered a cradle of civilization.

On a recent trip along the river, we found a wasteland dotted with depopulated towns, gutted factories and civilians struggling to get by.

We mostly stayed on the east bank, an area out of Damascus’s hands that is effectively stateless and boxed in by hostile powers. The only way in was to cross the Tigris River from Iraq in a shaky, seatless motorboat.

As the government of President Bashar al-Assad has focused its military power on defeating rebels in the north and south, the river has emerged as the collision point for the great powers and their local allies struggling for influence in the east.

On the eastern bank are mostly American-backed Kurdish-led militias. On the west, along the northern part of the river, are Turkish-backed rebels. Farther south are Syrian forces supported by Russia and Iran. The Islamic State still holds a pocket along the river near the border with Iraq.

TURKEY

Zour Maghar

Euphrates River

Manbij

SYRIA

Lake Assad

Raqqa

Tabqa Dam

Deir al-Zour

80 miles

TURKEY

Area of

detail

SYRIA

LEBANON

Damascus

IRAQ

JORDAN

100 miles

By The New York Times

For now, the division is holding because none of the other powers wants to confront the United States, which has about 2,000 soldiers on the eastern side and whose fighter jets control the skies there.

Most of the world has accepted that Mr. Assad will continue to rule Syria, but the standoff and shattered landscape along the Euphrates raise questions about whether he can ever stitch the whole country back together.

The immediate question is how long the United States will stay. President Trump has said he wants to pull out the troops, who lead an international coalition against the Islamic State. If he does, the United States’ local allies fear the worst.

“The mere presence of the coalition in the region gives a message to the regime and to the Turks not to interfere: ‘This is where you stop,’ ” said Muhammad Kheir Sheikho, a member of the civil council in Manbij. “The withdrawal of the coalition forces, and at their head the American forces, would cause complete chaos in the area.”

A Place Few Americans Have Heard Of

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An American military convoy patrols the front near Manbij several times a day, a show of force to protect the city from Turkey, an American ally.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Three hulking, armored American military vehicles leave their base in the olive groves east of Manbij and rumble off to patrol the front lines. American soldiers staff gun turrets atop each vehicle, helicopters or drones fly overhead, and the convoy flies large American flags to make it clear who is driving.

The Americans came to Syria in 2014 to fight the Islamic State, but the jihadist group’s nearest outpost is 200 miles away. The convoy heads out several times a day to protect Manbij, a town with no resources and which few Americans have heard of, from Turkey, a NATO ally.

The American presence in Manbij is a clear indication that the United States came to Syria with one goal but picked up others along the way, complicating a potential withdrawal.

As the United States worked with Kurdish forces to take territory back from the Islamic State, its footprint in eastern Syria expanded. The area, about one-quarter of Syria and mostly desert, is now dotted with American military bases — housed in fields, in an out-of-use cement factory and in oil and gas facilities that the Syrian government would like to take back.

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Kurdish troops, in a sandbagged post outside of Manbij, fear a disaster if the Americans leave.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

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The American security umbrella has allowed Manbij to become a relatively stable island in the war-torn country.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

The American security umbrella has allowed Manbij to become a relatively stable island in a war-torn country. It is a local economic hub, with a bustling market and about 200,000 new residents displaced from elsewhere.

But Turkey sees Syria’s Kurdish militia as a terrorist threat on its border and has threatened to attack it. The United States worries that a Turkish attack on Manbij would siphon off the Kurdish fighters from the battle against the Islamic State in the south. Thus the American patrols to keep the Turks at bay.

But as the battle against the Islamic State winds down, the Americans will have less reason to stay.

On the flat roof of a cinder-block farmhouse converted into a military base west of town, Kurdish militiamen pointed across a shallow valley at Turkish military positions and acknowledged that the Turks could storm the area quickly if they wanted. But they did not because of the American military base nearby: a few trailers surrounded by armored vehicles, the Stars and Stripes flying overhead.

“If it weren’t for the Americans, there would be a disaster here,” said Ibrahim Sheikh Muhammad, a Kurdish militiaman.

Burned, Bombed and Still Turning

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The control room of the Tabqa Dam, built by the Soviets, its turbines blown up by the Islamic State, its buildings shattered by American-led airstrikes. It is now back online.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Most of the territory held by the United States and its Kurdish allies was once ruled by the Islamic State, and the scars of the military campaign to defeat it run deep.

South of Manbij stands the Tabqa Dam, which the Soviets built in 1973, creating Syria’s largest body of water, Lake Assad, and generating power for much of the country.

The jihadists of the Islamic State ran the dam for years but blew up its turbines when they retreated.

It is now back at work, sort of. Its 350 employees work in buildings shattered by coalition airstrikes that blew holes in walls and shook tiles off the floors. Inside the hydroelectric station, rows of charred circuit boxes set alight by the jihadists sit below ceilings stained black from smoke.

But three of the dam’s turbines were whirring as water rushed through below, and a man with a blowtorch worked to repair a fourth. From eight damaged turbines, engineers had salvaged enough parts to rebuild three of them.

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The Tabqa Dam is a rare example of cooperation across battle lines, run by the Kurds with Syrian government help.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

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The Tabqa Dam created Lake Assad, Syria’s largest body of water, where a Kurdish family displaced by the fighting lunches at a cafe.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

The dam is a rare example of cooperation across opposing sides. A power line that connects it to a smaller dam passes through a government-controlled area, sending electricity to the station that provides drinking water to the city of Aleppo, said Mohammed Sheikho, the head of the mechanical department. And the Syrian government still pays salaries to some workers.

But the dam is just limping along.

New heavy electric cables cannot be installed because the German company that made them will not send its engineers into a war zone. And the country best able to fix the rest of the dam, Russia, is allied with the Syrian government.

Even worse, there isn’t enough water.

Since the Kurds took over the area, Turkey has reduced the amount of water it allows into Syria by more than half, limiting the generation of electricity, said Muhammad Tarboush, the dam’s supervisor.

The situation had never been so dire, he said, even when the Islamic State was in charge.

“They are boycotting us with water,” he said.

Shattered City, Uncertain Future

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With Raqqa’s 32 bridges destroyed by the war, residents depend on crude barges to cross the river.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

On the rocky banks of the Euphrates in the former capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, boatmen yell to coax passengers onto rickety metal barges. Once they are filled with passengers, cars, motorcycles and trucks bearing everything from diapers to flatbread, the motors roar and belch black smoke as the men pilot their charges across the pale green water.

Raqqa was once a commercial center for Syria’s breadbasket. Now, it is an orphaned city in ruins.

The military campaign that drove out the jihadists in October left two-thirds of the city’s buildings damaged or destroyed, local officials said. Entire city blocks were erased and apartment buildings brought to the ground. Residents have returned to find walls and ceilings missing from their homes. Some even struggle to find their homes.

But the world powers who fought here, led by the United States, are staying out of reconstruction, so Raqqa’s residents are largely on their own.

All 32 bridges in the area were destroyed. The two major bridges spanning the Euphrates are impassable, cutting the city in half. One has a hole large enough for a tractor-trailer to fall through. Under the other, boys climb downed electrical cables to plunge in to the water below.

That has left only the barges to get people across.

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A bombed-out bridge in Raqqa, no longer suitable for crossing the river, has been repurposed as a diving platform.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

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The military campaign that drove the Islamic State out of Raqqa left two-thirds of the city’s buildings damaged or destroyed.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Muhammad Jassem, a heavy-machine operator, lives on one side of the river and his elderly parents on the other. The once-simple trip to visit them now takes longer, costs more and gets his shoes and trousers wet.

“As you can see, life is a bit miserable here,” he said after wading ashore.

Everyone relied on the boats: a woman taking her grandson to the doctor for diarrhea; a family of four crowded onto a single motorcycle; a shopkeeper hauling chips and soft drinks.

Since the battle ended, the United States has put $ 13.7 million into Raqqa for water, electricity, rubble removal and other projects, in addition to $ 54 million to clear mines left by the Islamic State, according to the State Department.

But it is not rebuilding the city, which Ahmed Ibrahim, the city’s co-mayor, estimated would cost $ 5 billion.

He had no idea where that money would come from and worried that a lack of support would leave a vacuum that the Syrian government or an extremist group like the Islamic State could exploit.

“As long as they give concrete aid, the people will belong to them,” he said.

Facing Off Across the Water

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In Deir al-Zour Province, people take rowboats from the Kurdish controlled-side of the Euphrates to the other bank, controlled by the Syrian government.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Farther south, the road along the Euphrates is strewn with the remnants of an economy blown back decades by the war: a gutted sugar factory, an idled cotton mill, a train station littered with cars blown off their tracks.

The Syrian government controls Deir al-Zour, the largest Syrian city on the Euphrates, but the bridge that connects it to its eastern suburbs across the river is destroyed.

The Kurds, their Arab allies and the United States hold the eastern side, with bases in the oil and gas fields to keep the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies from retaking them.

In some places, opposing bases face each other across the water, so close that soldiers can see each other’s flags and watch each other smoking cigarettes. At one crossing point, a local militiaman monitored the eastern side, while Syrian soldiers stood on the other, about 200 yards away, while residents rowed across in battered metal canoes.

“It’s like an international border,” said a woman on the Deir al-Zour civil council after stepping off a metal canoe that carried her from the government side.

The woman, who spoke on condition of anonymity so that she could continue to visit her parents on the western side, said that most of the forces on the government’s side were Syrian but that she sometimes saw Russians and Iranian-backed militiamen from Iraq and Afghanistan buying items in shops.

Incursions in either direction are rare. In February, a column of tanks carrying about 500 pro-government forces, including Russian mercenaries, crossed the river in what appeared to be a push to seize an oil field. The United States repelled the raid, killing 200 to 300 of them.

Since then, all sides have largely accepted the river as the dividing line, an understanding likely to hold until the Americans leave.

The division was bad for Syria, the local councilwoman said, but she did not know how to end it.

Wives and Children of ISIS: Warehoused in Syria, Unwanted Back Home

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“Who is responsible for us?” asks Sarah Ibrahim, 31, one of more than 2,000 foreign women and children detained at camps in northern Syria with no foreseeable way out.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

ROJ CAMP, Syria — When her husband uprooted their family from Morocco to live under the Islamic State in Syria, Sarah Ibrahim had little choice but to go along. After he disappeared — she believes he was killed in an airstrike on a prison — she fled with her two sons.

They were captured last year and have been held ever since in this dusty, sweltering detention camp in northeastern Syria. They are among the more than 2,000 foreign women and children being held in such camps, trapped in a legal and political limbo with no foreseeable way out.

Their home countries do not want them back, fearing they could spread radical Islamist ideology. The Kurdish authorities that administer this stateless war zone do not want them either, and say it is not their job to indefinitely detain citizens of other countries.

“You told us to leave ISIS and we left, but we are still considered ISIS,” said Ms. Ibrahim, 31, her frustration dissolving into tears. “So who is responsible for us? Who will determine our fate?”

The so-called caliphate of the Islamic State, which once stretched across large swaths of Syria and Iraq, drew tens of thousands of partisans from around the world who came to fight or to live in what was billed as a pure Islamic society. Among them were many women, some who were brought by their husbands or fathers. Others came alone and married, or were forced to marry, after they arrived.

But as the caliphate collapsed under a military campaign by Kurdish militias backed by a United States-led military coalition, many of the men were killed or captured. The wives and children who survived ended up in camps like this, unwanted by anyone.

“We are working responsibly, but the international community is trying to flee from its responsibilities,” said Abdul-Karim Omar, an official in the local administration charged with persuading governments to take their citizens back, an effort he acknowledges has not been very successful.

“This is a ball of fire that everyone is trying to get rid of and threw to us,” he said.

The absence of any plan to deal with the detainees is part of the wider disorder in the lands liberated from the jihadists. In Iraq, many of the women who once lived among them face swift trials and death sentences on charges of supporting the Islamic State.

In Syria, they are effectively prisoners in dingy camps in an area under the control of no internationally recognized authority that might be able to press their home countries to take them back.

On a rare visit to the largest of these camps, known as Roj, Kurdish officials allowed us to interview Arab women held there but refused to let us interview or photograph Western women for fear it would complicate negotiations with their governments about their return home.

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An Egyptian woman and her daughters inside their tent at Roj Camp. The camp’s 1,400 foreigners come from about 40 countries, including Turkey, Tunisia, Russia and the United States.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

But during a walk through the camp, we spoke informally with women from France, Germany, Denmark, Holland and a number of Arab countries. Kurdish officials did not let us ask the Western women their names.

Some said their husbands had forced them to go to Syria. Others said the trip had been a mistake that their children were unjustly paying the price for.

Near a bank of latrines, three women — two French and one German — dragged their toddlers down a rocky lane in plastic crates on wheels.

“Of course we made mistakes, but anyone can make a mistake,” said the German woman, a dark blue head scarf around her pale face.

She was 24, had come to Syria with her German husband and had three children, she said. Like many women in the camp, she acknowledged that she had come voluntarily, but said that life under the jihadists had been worse than she expected and that once there it was impossible to flee.

“There was no way to go,” she said. “Either you go to prison or they would kill you.”

One of the Frenchwomen, a 28-year-old mother of three, called her Syria adventure an enormous mistake.

“Don’t we deserve, what do you call it, redemption?” she asked.

Foreign governments, including the United States, provide some aid to the local administration, but it is a pittance compared with what they spent on the military campaign. And the issue of detainees is particularly thorny, given the security risks of holding seasoned jihadists and the women and children who lived with them in a war zone.

The local administration has imprisoned more than 400 foreign fighters, Mr. Omar, the local official, said, and the United States is helping finance their detention to prevent prison breaks.

But the administration has received little help in dealing with the women and children who are now held in three camps.

It has established ad hoc courts to try Syrians for crimes committed under the Islamic State, but it does not try foreigners. And the women and children in the camps have not been accused of crimes.

The roughly 1,400 foreigners at Roj Camp are from about 40 countries, including Turkey, Tunisia, Russia and the United States, said Rasheed Omar, a camp supervisor. The women are generally well behaved, he said, although it is hard to determine what roles they may have performed under the jihadists and how much of the ideology they still endorse.

“There are some of them who are still following the ideology, and there are some who came because they thought they were coming to heaven and found out it was hell,” he said.

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More than 900 children, many of them toddlers, are being held at Roj Camp.CreditIvor Prickett for The New York Times

Ms. Ibrahim, for instance, said she was horrified by the jihadists’ public executions, their dictates about women’s dress and their ban on listening to music, even in her own home.

The biggest concern, however, is the children, many of them toddlers, who did not choose to join the jihadists. There are more than 900 children at Roj Camp, many with health problems, who have been out of school for years and lack any kind of official citizenship.

Most of the Europeans want to go home, even if that means standing trial, but few of the Arabs do, fearing that they will be tortured or executed.

Nadim Houry, director of the terrorism and counterterrorism program for Human Rights Watch, said the women and children were stuck in a “legal void.” While international law would require their countries to take them in if they made their way home, it does not oblige their governments to actively repatriate them.

Meanwhile, they were not awaiting trial for crimes they may have committed, nor were they free to leave.

Mr. Houry dismissed as excuses the reasons governments have given for not taking their people back, such as a lack of consular facilities or security concerns, saying that it was really a lack of political will. If the women were accused of crimes, they could be tried at home and imprisoned if needed, he said.

“Some of them may have committed crimes, but most of them were probably housewives, so you can’t just lump them together with people who committed beheadings,” he said. “What is troubling is that lots of them are children, and young children at that.”

So far, few countries have taken back their citizens.

Russia repatriated about 35 women and children, and Indonesia took back a family of about 15 people, said Mr. Omar, the local official. He said he was talking to Canada and Denmark about their citizens, but no returns had been finalized. Many other countries just ignored his overtures.

Dua Mohammed, 44, said she had come from Egypt to Syria with her husband, who had been attracted to the idea of the Islamic state. “But what we saw there in reality was not what we expected,” she said. “What we lived there was not what we had come for.”

Last year, her family managed to flee and was detained by the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led militia that is working with a United States-led coalition to fight the jihadists.

She ended up in the camp with her four children, ages 6 to 15, and her husband was thrown in prison, she said. She hasn’t heard from him since.

“We made a mistake, but everyone in the world makes mistakes,” she said. “How long can we pay the price for a mistake? For our whole lives?”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scorned and Trapped: Wives and Children of ISIS. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Israel and Iran, Newly Emboldened, Exchange Blows in Syria Face-Off

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Missiles seen from Damascus, Syria, on Thursday.CreditOmar Sanadiki/Reuters

JERUSALEM — The tense shadow war between Iran and Israel burst into the open early Thursday as Israeli warplanes struck dozens of Iranian military targets inside Syria. It was a furious response to what Israel called an Iranian rocket attack launched from Syrian territory just hours earlier.

The cross-border exchanges — the most serious assaults from each side in their face-off over Iran’s presence in Syria — took place a little more than a day after the United States withdrew from the Iran nuclear agreement.

Israel’s defense minister said that Israeli warplanes had destroyed “nearly all” of Iran’s military infrastructure in Syria after Iran launched 20 rockets at Israeli-held territory, none reaching their targets.

Iran struck shortly after President Trump pulled out of the nuclear agreement, raising speculation that it no longer felt constrained by the possibility that the Americans might scrap the deal if Iran attacked Israel.

Israel appeared newly emboldened as well, partly because of what seemed like extraordinary latitude from Russia, Syria’s most important ally, allowing the Israelis to act against Iran’s military assets in Syria.

Moscow did not condemn Israel’s strikes, as it had in the past, instead calling on Israel and Iran to resolve their differences diplomatically.

And Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who spent 10 hours with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Wednesday, told his cabinet on Thursday that he had persuaded the Russians to delay the sale of advanced weapons to Syria.

Russia and Iran have been allies in the Syrian war, defending President Bashar al-Assad. But as the war appears to be winding down, some analysts say the aims of Russia and Iran are diverging: Moscow prefers a strong secular central government in Syria, while Tehran prefers a weaker government that would allow Iran-backed militias free rein.

Israel has conducted scores of strikes on Iran and its allies inside Syria, rarely acknowledging them publicly. But before Thursday, Iran had not retaliated, seemingly handcuffed while it awaited Mr. Trump’s decision on the nuclear accord.

Even so, the Iranians have plenty to lose if the conflict continues to grow. They still seem determined to preserve the nuclear accord despite renewed American sanctions. The accord also includes Russia, China, Britain, France, Germany and the European Union.

“We see now that Netanyahu feels that Iran’s capacities in Syria are vulnerable, that he can target them, that Iran’s capacities to strike back are weakened — he took out some of these capacities, probably less than he claims — and that Iran has no significant way to react without risking itself,” said Ofer Zalzberg, an analyst at the International Crisis Group.

Israel made it clear on Thursday that its planning for the airstrikes had been known internally as “Chess,” and it looked in the aftermath as though Iran might have been baited into a trap on the Syrian game board.

Iran’s rocket attack against Israel came after what appeared to have been an Israeli missile strike against a village in the Syrian Golan Heights late on Wednesday.

Early on Thursday, Iranian forces fired about 20 Grad and Fajr-5 rockets at the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, targeting forward positions of the Israeli military, according to an Israeli military spokesman. The barrage was launched under the command of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and used Iranian weapons, said the Israeli spokesman, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus.

Four of the rockets were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system, and the rest fell short of the Israeli-controlled territory, the military said. Indeed, by Thursday morning, Israeli life returned to routine in the Golan Heights, with children going to school.

Still, the rocket attack was a significant escalation in Iran’s maneuvers in the Middle East. Though Israel has hit Iranian forces in Syria with a number of deadly airstrikes, Tehran had been restrained in hitting back, until now.

“Iran had to make a point: that it can respond, even if it’s a weak response,” said Joshua M. Landis, a Syria expert and director of the Center of Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “But it also revealed a weakness: Those rockets don’t have any brains.”

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An Israeli soldier in the Golan Heights on Thursday.CreditLior Mizrahi/Getty Images

After the Iranian rocket assault, Israel hit back much harder.

Israel said its response struck a severe blow to Iran’s military capacity in Syria. In a statement, the military said the targets included what it described as Iranian intelligence sites; a logistics headquarters belonging to the Quds Force; military compounds; munition storage warehouses of the Quds Force at Damascus International Airport; intelligence systems associated with those forces; and military posts and munitions in the buffer zone between the Syrian Golan Heights and the Israeli-occupied portion.

“If there is rain on our side, there will be a flood on their side,” Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said Thursday morning in remarks broadcast from a policy conference in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. “I hope we have finished with this round and that everybody understood.”

In all, at least 23 people were killed in the strikes, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group. The Syrian Army, by contrast, said that three people had died. Israel reported no casualties on its side.

Israel said it had no intention of further escalation, and analysts looking for clues to Iran’s potential response noted that its news media was largely ignoring the overnight hostilities, focusing instead on the nuclear deal. The English-language report on the airstrikes from Iran’s Fars news agency made no mention of Iranian involvement.

In a sign of international concern that the conflict could escalate, however, Britain, France, Germany and Russia were quick to call for calm. “We proceed from the fact that all issues should be solved through dialogue,” the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said at a news conference.

The White House condemned the missile attack on Israel, saying in a statement that it strongly supported “Israel’s right to act in self-defense” and called on Iran “to take no further provocative steps.”

It also inflicted new financial pain on Iran on Thursday. The Treasury Department said it had teamed with the United Arab Emirates to disrupt an Iranian currency exchange network that transferred millions of dollars, in coordination with Iran’s central bank, to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. “We are intent on cutting off I.R.G.C. revenue streams wherever their source and whatever their destination,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.

Iran has taken advantage of the chaos in Syria to build a substantial military infrastructure there. It has built and trained large militias with thousands of fighters and sent advisers from its Revolutionary Guards Corps to Syrian military bases.

Mr. Netanyahu said this week that the Revolutionary Guards had moved advanced weapons to Syria, including ground-to-ground missiles, weaponized drones and Iranian antiaircraft batteries that he said would threaten Israel’s military jets.

Israel’s political and security establishment has been unified and vocal in vowing to thwart Iran’s efforts to entrench itself militarily across Israel’s northern frontier and to build what Israeli and American officials refer to as a land corridor from Iran, through Iraq and Syria, to Lebanon.

Israel had warned Tehran that it would respond to any attack. Israel also broadcast warnings to Syria, saying that allowing Iranian entrenchment in its territory put Mr. Assad’s government at risk.

The tensions between Iran and Israel have been complicated further by Mr. Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement on Tuesday.

Israel had railed against the agreement, and Mr. Trump had campaigned on the promise of withdrawing from it, but European countries and many analysts had seen it as a crucial element holding back Iran and Israel, implacable foes, from all-out conflict.

As Mr. Trump announced his decision, Israel put its troops on “high alert,” called up reservists, set up Iron Dome batteries and instructed the authorities in the Golan Heights to prepare public bomb shelters after detecting what it said was irregular activity by Iranian forces.

Israel’s strikes early Thursday were some of the country’s largest aerial operations in decades across the Syrian frontier, and by far the broadest direct attack yet on Iranian assets. “This was an operation we prepared for, and were not surprised by,” Colonel Conricus said.

Israel said Russia had been informed before the overnight attack.

In recent years, Iran has helped Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed force in Lebanon, amass a huge arsenal of rockets it can use against Israel as a deterrent against Israeli strikes on Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel has carried out scores of strikes against what it says are advanced weapons and convoys destined for Hezbollah. But since February, when Israel intercepted what it later called an armed Iranian drone that had penetrated its airspace from Syria, setting off a day of heated cross-border exchanges, Israel’s efforts appear to have been more focused on Iranian assets in Syria.

“Israel doesn’t want another Hezbollah inside Syria, it doesn’t want another Lebanon,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a Syria scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The Israelis think they can surgically strike and not create a wider conflict. They think that Assad, working with the Russians, will have an incentive not to respond.”

A research center near Damascus that was hit by the American strike on Saturday. Youssef Badawi/EPA, via Shutterstock

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The day after the United States and its allies launched missile strikes against the Syrian government, very little had changed for most Syrians who have spent years suffering through their country’s civil war.

In Damascus, hundreds demonstrated in support of President Bashar al-Assad, whose grip remained unchallenged. In Raqqa, which was recently liberated from the Islamic State, teams defused mines the jihadists had strewn across the destroyed city. Thousands of people from Douma, the site of the reported chemical attack that prompted the American strikes, looked for shelter after joining the millions of other Syrians who have been displaced from their homes.

And on the front lines separating hostile parties throughout country, fighting continued as it has for years.

Now that the dust has settled from the American strikes, with President Trump declaring “mission accomplished,” Russia logging complaints and Mr. Assad returning to work, how does Syria move forward?

For tomorrow and the next day, at least, it will remain mired in its painful status quo: a multilayered conflict with the Syrian people stranded in battles between global and regional powers. The United Nations will keep organizing talks that do not bring peace, and the Security Council will remain too divided to stop the bloodshed.

Seven years in, some now argue that the only realistic way to stop the war, prevent a jihadist resurgence and allow the country to move on is to acknowledge that Mr. Assad, with help from Iran and Russia, will remain in power and to effectively let him win.

Once the guns fall quiet, they say, Syria’s other sizable issues can be addressed: the fight between Turkey and the Kurds in the north; the shadow war between Iran and Israel; and the rebuilding of destroyed communities so that refugees can return.

Ceding that much to Mr. Assad has long been anathema in Washington and other Western capitals, where policymakers believe he should be punished for his brutality during the war and have vowed not to contribute to reconstruction as long as he remains in power.

Some counter that if the West refuses to invest the resources needed to determine Syria’s future, its efforts to penalize Mr. Assad will make life worse for average Syrians.

“You are not punishing Assad, you are punishing the poor Syrian people,” said Joshua Landis, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “If America’s objectives are countering terrorism, stabilization and the return of refugees, all of these will fail.”

Syrians in the Old City of Damascus on Sunday. Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

The strikes were not intended to topple Mr. Assad, damage the Russian and Iranian allies that support his troops, or protect civilians from violence. In fact, they were meticulously planned and executed to avoid altering the overall dynamics of the conflict and keep the United States from getting dragged further in.

That frustrated Mr. Assad’s foes.

“The American strikes did not change anything for Syrians,” said Osama Shoghari, an anti-government activist from Douma who is struggling to start a new life in an unfamiliar town 180 miles away from his home. “They did not change anything on the ground.”

The West’s resistance to further intervention is good news for Russia and Iran, and of course for Mr. Assad, who was happy on Sunday, according to a group of Russian politicians who visited him.

“President Assad has an absolutely positive attitude, a good mood,” said Natalya Komarova, a member of the delegation, according to Russian news agencies.

But in an acknowledgment of the war’s toll, another visitor reported that Mr. Assad said rebuilding Syria could cost $ 400 billion.

If the primary message of the strikes was that Mr. Assad could not use chemical weapons, a secondary message was that the West was going to leave him in power, no matter what else he did.

“Even if this is a chemical weapons deterrent, that leaves a whole arsenal of conventional means with which people can be killed in Syria with few real repercussions,” said Sam Heller, a senior analyst who studies Syria at the International Crisis Group. “There is every reason to expect that that will continue.”

Seven years of conflict have seen Syria sliced up by world powers, with the Turks administering towns in the north, the United States working with Kurdish-led militias in the east, and Russia and Iran helping Mr. Assad rout the remaining pockets of rebels elsewhere.

At this point, no one seems to have a realistic plan to broker a lasting peace between those forces that would bring Syria together again in a stable enough way to allow millions of refugees to return home and for rebuilding to begin. Many discount the idea that Mr. Assad can play a meaningful role in that process.

“It is very shortsighted and erroneous in my mind,” said Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “Facilitating a win for Assad is making sure that Syria remains the epicenter of instability in the region.”

Research by the center has found that if Mr. Assad remains in power, it would discourage the return of Syrian refugees from neighboring countries and Europe. “They are not going back as long as Assad is in power because they don’t believe that there will be safety and stability while Assad is there,” Ms. Yahya said.

The only solution, she said, is a settlement between Russia and the United States that other powers, like Turkey and Iran, could eventually be brought into. But reaching such an agreement would involve an intensity of diplomatic efforts that Mr. Trump’s administration is not interested in.

Syrian families displaced from eastern Ghouta held pots as they waited to receive food at a shelter in the Damascus countryside on Friday. Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

After announcing Saturday’s strikes, Mr. Trump painted a pessimistic view of the United States’ ability to effect change in the Middle East.

“No amount of American blood or treasure can produce lasting peace and security in the Middle East,” he said. “It’s a troubled place. We will try to make it better, but it is a troubled place.”

He suggested that Arab allies could play an increased role, mentioning Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Qatar. But the first two are bogged down in a war in Yemen, and the first three are locked in a bitter dispute with the fourth, making it unclear how they would work together to fix Syria.

Besides working with a Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces to fight the Islamic State, the United States is helping restore areas like the city of Raqqa that were recently retaken from the jihadists.

Given the tremendous damage to the city, this is a gargantuan task, said Mustafa al-Abed, of the Raqqa Civil Council, which is supported by the United States. Among his group’s priorities are fixing the water and electricity networks, clearing rubble from roads and restoring irrigation networks so that farmers can plant.

But before that can happen, and before residents can return to their homes, the city must be cleared of the many mines and explosive booby traps that the jihadists planted before their defeat.

“They are everywhere,” Mr. Abed said of the mines. “In homes, in cars, in roads. There is no normal size or place. They are everywhere.”

He was dismissive of Saturday’s strikes, which he said were preceded by so many threats from Mr. Trump that the Syrian government had ample time to evacuate buildings and hide sensitive materials.

“They have used all kinds of weapons,” he said, of the Syrian government’s forces. “So the strikes should have been strong enough to break the back of the regime.”

The only thing that was preventing the government, Russia and Iran from returning to his part of the country was the presence of American troops, he said. He feared what would happen if the United States left.

“We will go back to being a region of struggles, like we were before,” he said. “We’ll return to fighting and fear and blood.”

WASHINGTON — Defense Department officials said on Saturday that American-led strikes against Syria had taken out the “heart” of President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program, but acknowledged that the Syrian government most likely retained some ability to again attack its own people with chemical agents.

Warplanes and ships from the United States, Britain and France launched more than 100 missiles at three chemical weapons storage and research facilities near Damascus and Homs, the officials told reporters, in an operation that President Trump and Pentagon leaders hailed as a success.

“A perfectly executed strike last night,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Thank you to France and the United Kingdom for their wisdom and the power of their fine Military. Could not have had a better result. Mission Accomplished!”

The president, in declaring the mission accomplished, invoked a phrase made infamous by President George W. Bush in 2003, when he declared success in an Iraq conflict that would end up continuing for more than eight years before American troops finally withdrew.

Beyond the immediate question of whether the new strikes actually accomplished the stated goal of diminishing Syria’s capacity to make and use chemical agents, the attack posed the risk of drawing the United States more deeply into a conflict in which Russia and Iran have more invested than ever in keeping Mr. Assad in power.

The United States is “locked and loaded” to strike again if Mr. Assad is believed to renew his use of chemical weapons, Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, told the Security Council on Saturday at an emergency meeting called by Russia.

“We are confident that we have crippled Syria’s chemical weapons program. We are prepared to sustain this pressure, if the Syrian regime is foolish enough to test our will,” Ms. Haley said.

“No amount of American blood or treasure can produce lasting peace and security in the Middle East,” President Trump said in his statement announcing the airstrikes. “It’s a troubled place. We will try to make it better, but it is a troubled place.” Tom Brenner/The New York Times

She said that Russia had failed to abide by a 2013 promise to ensure that Syria got rid of its chemical weapons stockpiles.

“While Russia was busy protecting the regime, Assad took notice,” she said. “The regime knew that it could act with impunity, and it did.”

The Pentagon provided no immediate evidence that the sites that were struck were producing substances covered by the 2013 agreement between Russia and the United States to eliminate Syria’s chemical arms.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on Friday that the American government was confident that Syrian forces had used chlorine in the deadly attack on civilians last Saturday in Douma, but did not provide evidence.

The White House has cited photographs and videos from Douma to make the case, and has dismissed alternative explanations from the Syrian and Russian governments. It said that the nerve agent sarin may have been used in addition to chlorine.

Chlorine, as a commercially available substance, was not included in the 2013 agreement. But the Chemical Weapons Convention, which Syria joined as part of the 2013 deal, prohibits the use of any chemical as a weapon.

The American-led strikes on Syria jolted residents of Damascus, the capital, from their beds as their walls and windows shook. American officials said the offensive was to punish Syria for the Douma attack, which left scores dead.

A group from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which had announced a fact-finding mission to determine if chemical weapons were used in the Douma attack, arrived in Damascus on Saturday morning, the group said in a statement.

A statement by the Syrian military said 110 missiles had been fired in the American-led strike. Three people were injured in Homs, it said. Videos from Damascus showed Syrian air defense missiles launching into a dark night sky, and the Russian military said that at one Syrian air base, all 12 cruise missiles that targeted the site had been shot down.

Defense Department officials batted down those claims, saying that the entire American-led operation was over and the targets were destroyed before Syria launched any of the 40 missiles it fired into the air.

“Taken together, these attacks were able to overwhelm the Syrian air defense system,” Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff director, said at a news conference. “None of our aircraft involved were successfully engaged by Syrian defense forces.”

He added that the barrage of missiles had hit their targets within a couple of minutes at most. He said that all three targets had been destroyed, and that all warplanes had returned safely to base.

But the strikes were limited, with an eye toward making sure they did not draw retaliation from Russia and Iran and set off a wider conflict. For that reason, Mr. Assad may still be able to use chemical agents in the future.

“I would say there’s still a residual element of the Syrian program that’s out there,” General McKenzie said. “I’m not going to say that they’re going to be unable to continue to conduct a chemical attack in the future. I suspect, however, they’ll think long and hard about it.”

In a statement, the British government said that Prime Minister Theresa May, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Mr. Trump had agreed in separate phone calls that the military strikes had been a success, “sending a clear message that the use of chemical weapons can never become normalized.”

But the limited nature of the strikes left some members of Congress and other observers underwhelmed.

“I fear that when the dust settles, this strike will be seen as a weak military response and Assad will have paid a small price for using chemical weapons yet again,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement. “Assad has likely calculated a limited American strike is just the cost of doing business.”

Randa Slim, an analyst at the Middle East Institute, tweeted: “If this is it, Assad should be relieved.”

“The United States and its allies continue to demonstrate blatant disregard for international law,” said the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vasily A. Nebenzya, on Saturday. “It’s time for Washington to learn that the international code of behavior regarding the use of force is regulated by the United Nations Charter,” he added.

Syrian government supporters waved Syrian, Iranian and Russian flags in Damascus on Saturday, after the missile strikes. Hassan Ammar/Associated Press

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, called the strikes “a crime” and the leaders of the United States, France and Britain “criminals.”

“But they will not benefit from this attack, just as they committed similar crimes over the past years during their presence in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan and did not benefit from them,” he said.

There were no signs of immediate retaliation, suggesting that Mr. Assad and his allies planned to weather the storm, perhaps in the belief that the United States was mostly concerned with avoiding deeper involvement.

“If I were Assad, I would be thinking, ‘Let them get it out of their system. Things are still trending in the right direction today,’ ” said Faysal Itani, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. “Nothing that Trump said on television really touched on the Syrian conflict.”

In announcing the strikes Friday night, Mr. Trump suggested that more American action could be on the way. “We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents,” Mr. Trump said. Other officials, however, said the United States and its allies were done for now.

Saturday’s strikes were more extensive than those Mr. Trump launched in the wake of another reported chemical attack last year, involving nearly double the number of missiles. But much has changed in Syria in the meantime to make Mr. Assad and his allies more secure.

The rebels who once threatened his control have been routed from all of Syria’s major cities, and even from smaller strongholds like Douma, the last town they held near Damascus, which they surrendered after the reported chemical attack last weekend.

Buses carrying rebel fighters and their families from their former rebel bastion of Douma, pictured on Friday at a checkpoint near the northern Syrian town of Al Bab. Nazeer Al-Khatib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Meanwhile, the war has further shattered Syria, and international powers including the United States, Russia, Turkey, Israel and Iran — along with militant groups including Hezbollah — have intervened to fight for their interests.

Iran and Russia have expanded their military reach. Russia has a presence on most Syrian military bases, and its air force has been essential to Mr. Assad’s recent advances. Iran has used the chaos of war to strengthen its proxies to deter and possibly confront Israel.

The United States still has about 2,000 troops in eastern Syria working with a Kurdish-led militia to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State. But with the militants now nearly defeated, American officials have started thinking about when to withdraw. Before the suspected chemical weapons attack in Douma, Mr. Trump had said he wanted to bring them home soon.

While the United States called for Mr. Assad to leave power early in the conflict and gave cash and arms to the rebels who sought to overthrow him, it has more recently resigned itself to his remaining in power. That was partly because it feared the vacuum that could emerge if Mr. Assad’s government collapsed, and partly because it was clear that Russia and Iran were willing to invest more in winning than the United States was.

So Saturday’s strikes remained focused on punishing him for using chemical weapons. Last year’s strikes had the same goal, but only succeeded for a limited time.

“Military interventions have a shelf life,” said Andrew J. Tabler, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Syria. “For a certain time, it prevented them from using chemical weapons, but after a while it dissipated. So we’ll have to wait to see how this attack is different.”

Mr. Trump made it clear when announcing the strikes that he does not consider it the job of the United States to fix problems in the Middle East.

“No amount of American blood or treasure can produce lasting peace and security in the Middle East,” he said. “It’s a troubled place. We will try to make it better, but it is a troubled place.”

He did, however, speak of working closely with American allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Qatar to ensure that Iran did not capitalize on the defeat of the Islamic State.

Still, such an international coalition would be starting years behind what Russia and Iran have already done, and some of the Arab allies Mr. Trump mentioned are not even speaking to each other. Mr. Trump has so far shown little penchant for the kind of strategic alliance-building it would take to change the direction of the war.

Some Syrians, however, took solace in the sight of smoke rising from Mr. Assad’s military bases.

“For many Syrians, the fact that their butcher was punished is incredibly cathartic,” Mouaz Moustafa, the executive director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which opposes the government, wrote on Twitter. “But war continues.”

For many Syrians the fact that their butcher was punished is incredibly cathartic. They’ve watched him torture people to death use white phosphorus n napalm to burn civilians. He targeted schools and hospitals and used sarin and chlorine against children. But war continues #Syria

WASHINGTON — The United States and European allies launched strikes on Friday against Syrian research, storage and military targets as President Trump sought to punish President Bashar al-Assad for a suspected chemical attack near Damascus last weekend that killed more than 40 people.

Britain and France joined the United States in the strikes in a coordinated operation that was intended to show Western resolve in the face of what the leaders of the three nations called persistent violations of international law. Mr. Trump characterized it as the beginning of a sustained effort to force Mr. Assad to stop using banned weapons.

“These are not the actions of a man,” Mr. Trump said of last weekend’s attack in a televised address from the White House Diplomatic Room. “They are crimes of a monster instead.”

While he has talked as recently as last week about pulling American troops out of Syria, he vowed to remain committed to the goal of preventing further attacks with deadly poisons. “We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents,” Mr. Trump said.

The strikes, carried with ship-based cruise missiles and manned aircraft, targeted three facilities associated with Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal, including a scientific research facility around Damascus, a chemical weapons storage facility around Homs alleged to be used for sarin gas and a nearby command post, the Pentagon said.

The Syrian Observatory said the Syrian Army’s 4th Division and Republican Guard was among the targets.

U.S. Strikes Chemical Weapons Sites in Syria

The airstrikes on three sites in Syria, launched early Saturday local time, were part of what officials said was an effort to deter future chemical attacks.

Residents of Damascus, the capital, woke to the sounds of multiple explosions shaking the city before the dawn call to prayer. The city and the hills are surrounded by military facilities, and it appeared that these were among the first targets.

Syrian state television said government air defense systems were responding to “the American aggression” and aired video of missiles being fired into a dark night sky. It was not clear if they hit anything. It reported that 13 missiles had been shot down by Syrian air defenses near Al-Kiswa, a town south of Damascus.

The targets were chosen to minimize the risk of accidentally hitting Russian troops stationed in Syria, according to Gen. James F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told reporters at the Pentagon on Friday night that the strike was completed and was designed as a one-night operation. “Right now this is a one-time shot and I believe it has sent a very strong message to dissuade him to deter him from doing it again,” he said.

Mr. Trump called on Syria’s patrons in Russia and Iran to force Mr. Assad to halt the use of poison gas in the seven-year-old civil war that has wracked his country.

“To Iran and to Russia I ask: What kind of a nation wants to be associated with the mass murder of innocent men, women and children?” he said. “The nations of the world can be judged by the friends they keep. No nation can succeed in the long run by supporting rogue states, brutal tyrants and murderous dictators.”

The strikes risked pulling the United States deeper into the complex, multisided war in Syria from which Mr. Trump only last week said he wanted to withdraw. They also raised the possibility of confrontation with Russia and Iran, both of which have military forces in Syria to support Mr. Assad.

Pentagon Briefing After Trump Announcement

Pentagon officials spoke to reporters after President Trump announced airstrikes against Syrian targets.

In choosing to strike, it appeared that Mr. Trump’s desire to punish Mr. Assad for what he called a “barbaric act” — and make good on his tweets promising action this week — outweighed his desire to limit the American military involvement in the conflict, at least in the short term.

The strikes marked the second time that Mr. Trump has attacked Syria to punish the government after it was accused of using chemical weapons. The White House had sought to craft a response that would be more robust than the attack in April 2017, when the United States fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian air base that was back in use a day later.

While France and Britain joined the United States in retaliating for the suspected chemical attack in the town of Douma outside Damascus last Saturday, Germany refused to take part, even though Chancellor Angela Merkel called the use of chemical weapons “unacceptable.”

Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said Syria had left the allies no choice. “This persistent pattern of behavior must be stopped — not just to protect innocent people in Syria from the horrific deaths and casualties caused by chemical weapons but also because we cannot allow the erosion of the international norm that prevents the use of these weapons,” she said.

But she also emphasized the limits of the operation’s goals, reflecting the reluctance in London as well as Washington to become too immersed in the fratricidal war in Syria.

“This is not about intervening in a civil war,” she said. “It is not about regime change. It is about a limited and targeted strike that does not further escalate tensions in the region and that does everything possible to prevent civilian casualties.”

British defense officials said four Royal Air Force Tornado GR4s participated in the strike, launching Storm Shadow missiles at a military facility about 15 miles west of Homs where they said Syria was believed to keep chemical weapon precursors stockpiled in violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Early reaction to the strikes from Capitol Hill appeared to break down along party lines, with Republicans expressing support for the president and Democrats questioning whether Mr. Trump has a well-thought-out strategy for what happens after the military action is over.

“President Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against the Syrian government without Congress’s approval is illegal and — absent a broader strategy — it’s reckless,” said Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, who has long argued that presidents should request permission from Congress before taking military action.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said that “one night of airstrikes is not a substitute for a clear, comprehensive Syria strategy.”

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican majority whip, wrote in a statement: “President Trump is right to assert that the Assad regime’s evil acts cannot go unanswered.”

The missiles struck Syria shortly after 4 a.m. local time on Saturday. A fact-finding mission from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons was to begin investigating the incident on Saturday in Douma, which had been held by rebels before the suspected attack. The mission’s job was only to determine whether chemical weapons had been used, not who had used them.

Medical and rescue groups have reported that the Syrian military dropped bombs that released chemical substances during an offensive to take the town. A New York Times review of videos of the attack’s aftermath, and interviews with residents and medical workers, suggested that Syrian government helicopters dropped canisters giving off some sort of chemical compound that suffocated at least 43 people.

On Friday, American officials said they had intelligence implicating the Syrian government. “We have a very high confidence that Syria was responsible,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. She said Russia was “part of the problem” for failing to prevent the use of such weapons.

Victims of a suspected chemical attack in Douma, Syria, on Sunday. Residents said they heard objects falling from the sky, followed by a strange smell that witnesses said resembled chlorine. Emad Aldin/EPA, via Shutterstock

At the United Nations, Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the world body, accused the Syrian government of using banned chemical arms at least 50 times since the country’s civil war began in 2011. State Department officials said the United States was still trying to identify the chemical used on April 7.

President Emmanuel Macron of France on Thursday cited proof that the Syrian government had launched chlorine gas attacks. The same day, the British Cabinet authorized Prime Minister Theresa May to join the United States and France in planning strikes against Syria.

Leaders in Syria, Iran and Russia denied that government forces had used chemical weapons, and accused rescue workers and the rebels who had controlled Douma of fabricating the videos to win international sympathy.

On Friday, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, said images of victims of the purported attack had been staged with “Britain’s direct involvement.” He provided no evidence.

Karen Pierce, Britain’s ambassador to the United Nations, called those allegations “bizarre” and “a blatant lie.”

Mr. Mattis had sought to slow down the march to military action as allies compiled evidence of Mr. Assad’s role that would assure the world the strikes were warranted. Mr. Mattis also raised concerns that a concerted bombing campaign could escalate into a wider conflict between Russia, Iran and the West.

Before the strikes, the United States had mostly stopped aiding Syria’s rebels, like those who were in Douma, who want to topple Mr. Assad’s government. The Pentagon’s most recent efforts in Syria have focused on the fight against Islamic State militants in the country’s east, where it has partnered with a Kurdish-led militia to battle the jihadists. It is the roughly 2,000 American troops there that Mr. Trump has said he wants to bring home.

We Asked Syrians About U.S. Airstrikes. This Is What They Said.

From the regime stronghold of Damascus to battle-scarred opposition areas, Syrians sent audio recordings to The Times in which they described what it’s like waiting for an attack by the U.S.-led coalition.

In his televised address on Friday night, Mr. Trump sought to repeat his desire to disentangle the United States from the Middle East at some point. “It’s a troubled place,” he said. “We will try to make it better, but it is a troubled place. The United States will be a partner and friend, but the fate of the region lies in the hands of its own people.”

Russian forces and Iranian-backed militias also are deployed around Syria to help fight the rebellion — including the Islamic State and other extremist groups — that has surged against Mr. Assad since the conflict started more than seven years ago.

Last year’s American attack on Syria came after a chemical attack on the village of Khan Sheikhoun killed scores of people. Mr. Trump ordered a cruise missile strike against the Al Shayrat airfield in central Syria, where the attack had originated. The base was damaged but Syrian warplanes were again taking off from there a day later.

Still, the response set Mr. Trump apart from President Barack Obama, who declined to respond with military force after a chemical weapons attack in August 2013 killed hundreds of people near Damascus, even though Mr. Obama had earlier declared the use of such weapons a “red line.”

Mr. Obama ultimately backed off a military strike and reached an agreement with Russia to remove Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal. That agreement was said to have been carried out, although a series of reported chemical attacks since have raised doubts about its effectiveness.

Both American presidents have sought to keep United States involvement in Syria focused on the battle against the Islamic State, and not on toppling Mr. Assad or protecting civilians from violence.

The question now for Mr. Trump is whether his intervention against Mr. Assad will make it harder to keep the United States from slipping deeper into the Syrian war.

Within hours, images of dead families sprawled in their homes threatened to change Mr. Trump’s calculus on Syria, possibly drawing him deeper into an intractable Middle Eastern war that he hoped to leave.

“Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Sunday. He blamed Iran and Russia — even singling out President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia by name — for their support of the Syrian government.

“Big price to pay,” he wrote, without providing details.

Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price…

The reported chemical attack on Douma, a suburb of the capital, Damascus, on Saturday seems to have squeezed Mr. Trump between conflicting impulses, and raised the political and military stakes as he charts the United States’ future in Syria.

On one hand, he has emphatically expressed his desire to bring American troops home as soon as possible in line with his “America First” approach. On the other, he has vowed to punish some bad actors, and withdrawing from Syria could open him up to criticism at home and abroad.

“The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria now would have major negative repercussions for the region and beyond,” said Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian-American professor of international relations at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Just last week, the presidents of Iran, Turkey and Russia joined hands at an international summit meeting in Ankara, Turkey, to celebrate their successes in Syria and plot their next moves. The United States, notably absent, had not even been invited.

“I want to get out,” he said at the White House last week. “I want to bring our troops back home.”

Mr. Trump’s aides quickly talked him out of an immediate withdrawal. But Mr. Trump made clear that he wanted the troops out within a few months, senior administration officials said, a decision that would alter the landscape in ways that would echo far beyond Syria’s borders.

Foes of the United States have cheered the prospect of an American withdrawal. But America’s regional allies, including Israel, Saudi Arabia and its partners in Syria, dread it.

They argue that American forces are still needed to provide a check on Russia, which considers Syria its strategic foothold in the Middle East, and Iran, whose proxies are building a military infrastructure in Syria to counter Israel.

A withdrawal could also leave the door open for the return of the Islamic State in some parts of Syria, the very reason the United States gave for intervening in the country to begin with.

The bombing that Mr. Trump was responding to was part of a battle between rebels and the Syrian government, one that the United States had withdrawn from long ago, in a part of the country where the United States has neither a military presence nor any clear allies.

There is nothing to stop Mr. Trump from ordering a missile strike on western Syria, where the chemical attack was alleged to have taken place, and still pulling the approximately 2,000 American troops out of eastern Syria, where their main task was battling the militants of the Islamic State. But the seesaw of withdrawal and deeper engagement, without the articulation of a clear strategy for the region, is sure to confuse allies and enemies alike.

Some politicians, including Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, even argued that Mr. Trump’s talk of a rapid withdrawal had emboldened President Bashar al-Assad of Syria to use chemical weapons.

.@POTUS‘s pledge to withdraw from #Syria has only emboldened Assad, backed by Russia & Iran, to commit more war crimes in #Douma. @POTUS responded after last year’s chemical attack. He should do so again & make Assad pay a price for his brutality. https://t.co/u30kF0ww8g

It was not clear on Sunday whether Mr. Trump’s tweets reflected serious planning for a military strike, or if the suspected chemical attack had changed his calculations about the necessity for a withdrawal of American ground forces. A White House official said he could provide no guidance beyond what the president had said on Twitter.

Mr. Trump’s furious response echoed his reaction to a similar attack that killed scores of people in northwestern Syria a year ago. Within three days of that attack, Mr. Trump sent a storm of cruise missiles raining down on the Syrian airfield where the attacks originated.

Graphic photos of the victims played a role in his decision then, as he expressed horror over images of “innocent children, innocent babies.” So did his repeated criticism of President Barack Obama for not intervening in similar circumstances.

But the strikes last April were an exception. Throughout the war, the United States has declined to intervene in Syria despite many attacks with much higher tolls.

“The Trump administration has ignored both conventional attacks on civilians and repeated use of chlorine gas against civilians which have claimed far more lives than this single horrific attack,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East adviser in Republican and Democratic administrations and vice president of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

Seven years of fighting have shattered Syria into a series of overlapping conflicts among a kaleidoscope of combatants and international powers seeking to advance their interests.

Over the course of the war, Russia and Iran have committed deeply to Mr. Assad and have made major military, financial and political investments to ensure his survival. The United States initially called for Mr. Assad to leave power, and supplied cash and guns to the rebels seeking to oust him, but gave up hope long ago that they would prevail in toppling him.

The primary involvement of the United States now is in eastern Syria, where it formed an alliance with a Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or S.D.F., to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State.

The Islamic State has lost most of its territory, giving the American-backed forces control of a large area where they have set up local administrations and occasionally clashed with the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies.

Those who support keeping American troops in Syria, including top American military officials, argue that they are needed to protect those gains.

Highlighting the internal debate in Washington, at virtually the same moment that Mr. Trump was saying it was time to leave, Gen. Joseph Votel, the head of the United States Central Command, was saying almost the opposite.

“The hard part, I think, is in front of us,” he said, suggesting that the United States should stabilize areas taken from the jihadists, return refugees to their homes and help with reconstruction. Currently, the United States military is clearing unexploded ordnance, mines and other booby traps from Raqqa just to make it minimally habitable. A withdrawal could jeopardize those endeavors.

The debate goes to the core of the American mission in Syria: whether United States troops are there solely to defeat the Islamic State militarily, or also to stabilize the areas the jihadists once ruled to keep them from coming back.

American military leaders have supported the latter option and consider the alliance with the S.D.F. an enduring strategic asset to accomplish that goal.

“We’ve always been there for them, and we’ll always be there,” Lt. Gen. Paul E. Funk II, the commander of the anti-Islamic State coalition, said in February during a meeting with a local military command in northern Syria.

Abandoning the force, which is led by Kurds, would also leave it at the mercy of other powers, particularly Turkey, which considers it terrorist and a threat to Turkish sovereignty.

One of the greatest beneficiaries of an American withdrawal would be Iran, a country that Mr. Trump has blamed for many of the troubles in the Middle East and has vowed to confront.

“It’s simple: If American forces leave Syria, there will be more room for Hezbollah and Iran to maneuver,” said Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line analyst in Iran.

Russia also cheered the prospect of an American withdrawal.

“The less American interference, the fewer American soldiers, the better for everyone,” said Andrei A. Klimov, deputy head of the foreign affairs committee of Russia’s upper house of Parliament. An American retreat would cement Russia’s status as a power to be reckoned with in the Middle East and would further burnish Mr. Putin’s reputation as a master tactician on the world stage.

Yet an American pullout could create headaches for Mr. Putin, who has repeatedly declared “mission accomplished” in Syria but has still not delivered on repeated pledges to draw down Russia’s military forces. An American withdrawal could also leave Russia stuck with the reconstruction bill for a country where many cities and most of the infrastructure have been destroyed.

Mr. Putin has called on “massive capital investments” from wealthy countries to help rebuild Syria, saying they need to become “more actively involved in deed and not only in word.”

But Western nations are unlikely to support the project as long as Mr. Assad, whom many consider a war criminal, remains in power.

Hanging over the decision to stay or leave is a the bitter American experience in Iraq.

In 2011, after years of heavy military engagement there, the United States declared victory over the Iraqi insurgency — the predecessor to the Islamic State — and left. Three years later, the jihadists returned, stronger than before, and took over a third of Iraq and a large part of Syria.

Some of the United States’ regional allies, and many of its own officials, believe the United States should remain in Syria to prevent that history from repeating itself. Merely talking about leaving could plant the seeds of that resurgence.

“Any decision to withdraw the American efforts from Syria now is not realistic or of a timely manner as the threat by terrorists groups is still there,” said Shahoz Hasan, a leader of the primary Kurdish political party in Syria. “Jihadists are looking forward to such a decision to be able to breathe again and reorganize their groups.”

]]>http://news.deconmit.com/world/as-trump-seeks-way-out-of-syria-new-attack-pulls-him-back-in.html/feed0‘ISIS Is Coming!’ How a French Company Pushed the Limits in War-Torn Syriahttp://news.deconmit.com/business/isis-is-coming-how-a-french-company-pushed-the-limits-in-war-torn-syria.html
http://news.deconmit.com/business/isis-is-coming-how-a-french-company-pushed-the-limits-in-war-torn-syria.html#commentsSun, 11 Mar 2018 03:06:48 +0000http://news.deconmit.com/business/isis-is-coming-how-a-french-company-pushed-the-limits-in-war-torn-syria.html

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PARIS — Mostafa Haji Mohamad, a medical worker, was just starting the morning shift at a cement factory in Syria when gunfire rattled across the desert. The air was stifling, and he and the other employees were on edge.

For months, they had worked to the percussion of distant fighting as the Islamic State waged fierce battles in the autumn of 2014 to seize territory in Syria’s rapidly escalating civil war. Their employer, one of the world’s largest cement makers, Lafarge, didn’t want to abandon the plant, but aimed to keep it running so it would be well positioned when the civil war ended. And the men, all local workers, had few other options for employment in a country where conflict was ravaging the economy.

Security managers urged the workers not to worry. Safety was a priority, they insisted. If the fighting got too close, Lafarge had an evacuation plan that included buses to get them out in case of danger.

As the men gathered that morning in a sweltering hall, Mr. Mohamad’s supervisor, the factory’s doctor, called with a frantic warning. ISIS had just taken the village closest the factory. “You’ve got to get out of there,” the supervisor said. “ISIS is coming!”

Mr. Mohamad and the rest of the employees ran outside. The evacuation buses were not there.

So they piled, one on top of the other, into two small cars and a delivery van. Mr. Mohamad jumped onto a rickety scooter and puttered nervously across the desert as explosions rang out.

They all got away. By nightfall, ISIS had captured the factory.

“What I want to know,” Mr. Mohamad said of Lafarge in an interview, “is why did they leave us there to face our deaths?”

While other multinational companies pulled out of Syria in the midst of the civil war, Lafarge made a calculated decision to stay, pushing the limits of international law to keep its operations running. Lafarge’s actions, reconstructed from sealed French court documents reviewed by The New York Times as well as interviews with former employees, provide rare insight into the costs and complexities of doing business in a war-torn country, trade-offs that have left a large company exposed to a French criminal investigation as well as a civil lawsuit.

To move supplies and employees through dangerous areas, and to secure raw materials, Lafarge funneled money to intermediaries who conducted negotiations with the Islamic State, as well as Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and other armed factions. All told, Lafarge agents shelled out over $ 5 million to armed groups, according to the documents, which include testimony to investigators by former Lafarge officials, testimony and witness accounts of former employees, company correspondence and a confidential internal review of Lafarge’s Syria operations by the global law firm Baker McKenzie. The broad accounts of the former workers’ experience were backed up by the documents, including the executives’ and employees’ testimony.

Bruno Lafont, a former chief executive of Lafarge, the French cement maker, in 2015. The company is accused of putting employees in danger and paying off militant groups to keep its Syrian operations running.CreditEric Piermont/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But the money didn’t always assure the safety of Lafarge’s workers or its operations. Between 2012 and the end of 2014, at least a dozen workers were kidnapped, according to testimony and witness statements of former employees, company documents and the internal review. Employees faced gun-toting militants when they went to work. And the factory — one of the biggest foreign investments in Syria — was captured anyway. It has been shuttered ever since.

A panel of French judges appointed by the Paris High Court, which oversees criminal investigations, is now looking into whether Lafarge put workers at risk and violated international sanctions by paying the Islamic State and other armed groups to keep operating as war bore down. Six former top Lafarge officials, including two former chief executives, are being formally investigated under charges of financing terrorism.

The judges, who decide whether cases go to trial, are also examining a lawsuit by Sherpa, a French anti-corruption organization that pursues humanitarian abuses by corporations, on behalf of former employees alleging Lafarge was complicit in war crimes. The employees, in the lawsuit, claim that the company ignored the dangers they faced, and pressured them to keep working.

“Lafarge acted as if it was above the law,” said Marie-Laure Guislain, the head of litigation at Sherpa. “But it played a role in an armed conflict, as well as in the violation of human rights, and must be held accountable.”

The Sherpa lawsuit helped prompt the French investigation, as did reports on Lafarge’s activities by the French newspaper Le Monde.

All of the former Lafarge executives have denied the charges against them, which could be dropped if judges find the evidence insufficient. If prosecuted, the executives could face penalties of up to 10 years in jail and fines of 225,000 euros. Authorities will also determine whether the company itself can be held liable. The activity occurred before Lafarge merged with the Swiss cement giant Holcim in 2015.

The former chief executive Eric Olsen resigned last year after the internal inquiry, although Lafarge concluded that he was not responsible for, or aware of, the activity. In the United States, the company, now called LafargeHolcim after the merger, dropped plans to supply building materials for President Trump’s proposed wall on the border with Mexico amid criticism in France over the Syria affair.

LafargeHolcim, in a statement to The Times, insisted that the No. 1 priority of Lafarge executives was to guarantee employee safety, and pinned the decisions on local managers who “wrongly believed” they were acting in the interests of the company and its employees. The company acknowledged “unacceptable errors committed in Syria,” and said that it “deeply regrets what happened.”

Residents leaving Manbij, Syria, in a 2016 evacuation. The town, which is near the Lafarge cement plant, was chosen several years ago as a place to relocate some workers for safety and in order to keep it operating.CreditRodi Said/Reuters

It also said that while the use of an intermediary was a “serious concern,” its internal review “could not establish with certainty the ultimate recipients of the funds.”

LafargeHolcim’s chief executive, Jan Jenisch, said the company is cooperating with French authorities. “I am the most interested person that truth comes out and we can close this chapter, which we are very sorry about,” he said during a presentation of the company’s results last week.

In its statement, LafargeHolcim added it had put in place extensive reviews and controls “to ensure that LafargeHolcim today is a different company with further enhanced compliance.”

Mr. Mohamad and the other workers, all of whom survived, are now trying to rebuild their lives. Many had to flee Syria, becoming refugees in Turkey and Europe. While some managed to get jobs, others struggled afterward.

For a while, Dr. Adham Basho, the Lafarge employee who warned Mr. Mohamad, lived with his wife, children and 18 other families in a Turkish refugee facility after leaving Syria. He has found only odd jobs to support his family. Hisham Haji Osman, an information technology specialist, made it to Germany and is still trying to land permanent work. Mr. Mohamad is living as a refugee in Turkey, unable to return home while war persists.

‘We Kept Going’

When Lafarge bought a dilapidated factory in northern Syria in 2007, one of the biggest advantages was a local partner with ties to President Bashar al-Assad’s government.

The partner, Firas Tlass, an influential tycoon, could navigate back channels in a country with murky rules and bureaucracy. He arranged an operating license and other permits for Lafarge.

Founded in 1833 as a family business in France, Lafarge had a history of landing big and complicated projects. In the mid-19th century, it won a contract to build the Suez Canal in Egypt. During World War II, it helped furnish cement for the construction of a massive coastal wall of bunkers for the Nazis, known as the Atlantic Wall, that stretched from Scandinavia to the Spanish border.

Militant Islamist fighters parading along the streets of Raqqa province in June 2014. After Raqqa fell to the Islamic State in 2013, fighting moved closer to the region in northern Syria where the cement plant is located.CreditReuters

In Syria, Lafarge saw a new opening to the Middle East. After a three-year renovation of the €680 million plant, Lafarge Cement Syria opened in October 2010, employing hundreds of people and generating thousands of related jobs. Trucks and vans crisscrossed the desert, transporting employees, delivering Lafarge cement and bringing in fuel and raw materials from nearby quarries.

As operations ramped up, a wave of revolutionary fervor from the Arab Spring movement swept the region. Anti-government protests spread to Syria, and were brutally suppressed in March 2011 by government security forces. Soldiers from Syria’s army defected and, along with civilians who took up arms, formed rebel groups to battle the government, some of them loosely organized as the Free Syrian Army. The government responded by attacking rebel-held areas, in an increasingly complex and bloody conflict that continues to batter the country.

While the fighting took root in the south, the security around the Lafarge plant in the north slowly began to deteriorate. Free Syrian Army groups moved into the area, long controlled by Mr. Assad’s government, along with the militia of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party, or PYD. By the end of 2011, the United Nations declared Syria in a state of civil war, and the European Union placed an embargo on arms and oil purchases in Syria.

After that, Total, the French oil giant, halted its Syrian operations. Other French multinationals followed, including Bel Group, the maker of Babybel cheese, and Air Liquide, France’s largest gas company.

Not Lafarge. Bruno Lafont, who was the Lafarge chief executive at the time, saw no reason to leave. Company security advisers assured bosses at headquarters in Paris that the plant was not in a combat zone and remained safe. “So we kept going,” Mr. Lafont told investigators, according to the court documents. “Lafarge has never run away.”

By summer 2012, the situation in Syria had grown increasingly uncertain, and Lafarge decided to move hundreds of foreign employees out of the country for their safety. Senior managers, including Bruno Pescheux, the chief executive of Lafarge Cement Syria at the time, relocated to Cairo to oversee operations remotely.

The Syrian employees kept working. Their job was to keep the cement flowing — and to make the factory appear occupied as a way of discouraging militants from raiding it.

Lafarge said it wanted to keep providing jobs for locals who eagerly wanted to work. The company relocated employees to Manbij, a town near the plant, and provided lodging for others inside the factory compound so they could keep working as road travel grew more risky, according to testimony by former executives and employees. When the civil war ended, “we’d at least have an operation that could furnish cement for the reconstruction of Syria,” Mr. Pescheux told French investigators.

Marie-Laure Guislain, head of litigation at Sherpa, the French anti-corruption organization that has sued Lafarge on behalf of employees who say they were pressured to continue working in a war zone.CreditRoberto Frankenberg for The New York Times

Workers felt fortunate to be employed by a major French multinational that offered good salaries to support their families in a region with few opportunities. Yet as the situation grew starker, Lafarge’s local managers, the employees said in interviews, witness accounts and testimony, turned up the pressure, threatening to dismiss or cut the pay of those who balked at the worsening safety environment.

“Before the war, the management practices were very good,” said Jarir Yahyaalmullaali, a former warehouse keeper. But later, he added, “they would force you to go to work and threaten to dismiss you even if there were problems and the roads were dangerous.”

After their foreign colleagues were evacuated, the Syrian employees discussed forming a union or striking to protest deteriorating work conditions. They were especially upset about being ferried in Lafarge-contracted vans through checkpoints held by a rotating cast of armed militants, the employees said in interviews, testimony and accounts submitted to the court.

“Imagine the journey,” said Nidal Wahbi, a former Lafarge human resources manager in Syria who is part of the lawsuit. “You could be stopped at any time, and either they let you go, or they could take you from the car for questioning.” When sniper bullets grazed his vehicle one morning, “I realized for the first time how unsafe it was,” he said. “But the next day, you had to go through the same road, because Lafarge would ask why you didn’t go to work.”

A Growing Threat

When the fighting got too close, the payments to ISIS started to flow.

In mid-2012, local Lafarge executives provided the Syrian partner with a monthly budget of around $ 100,000. They gave him instructions to act as an intermediary with local groups to ensure safe passage around the factory, Mr. Pescheux told investigators.

The partner, Mr. Tlass, according to the law firm’s review, steered large sums to the Free Syrian Army, which occupied Manbij, where Lafarge had relocated employees. More money flowed to the Kurds, who had worked with the Free Syrian Army and promised military-style protection for the factory, which they considered to be in their territory.

The payoffs didn’t guarantee safety. In autumn, the Kurds kidnapped nine Lafarge employees and transferred them to local militias. Lafarge’s local managers reported the kidnappings to Paris and spent around €200,000 to secure their release, according to the internal inquiry and testimony of former executives.

The troubles worsened in 2013, when the Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front, and other Islamic groups seized Raqqa, a strategic city about 90 kilometers south of the factory. In the ensuing months, a schism within Al Qaeda split the Nusra Front from the Islamic State group, which took control of Raqqa. ISIS began a slow but steady push toward the region around the Lafarge plant.

The Lafarge cement factory in northern Syria was seized by ISIS in 2014 and has been closed since.CreditDaniel Riffet/Alamy

Soon, the fixer, Mr. Tlass, was funneling around $ 20,000 a month to ISIS, and additional funds to the Nusra Front, to ensure that they, too, wouldn’t interfere with Lafarge’s employees and supplies, according to the court documents. Money was also paid to obtain raw materials from ISIS-held areas. By steering the payoffs through the fixer, “there were never any direct links with ISIS,” Christian Herrault, a former Paris-based deputy chief executive responsible for Syria, told the investigators in France. When investigators asked if Lafarge had paid Islamist groups, he replied: “Indirectly, yes.”

Local managers tried to mask the payments with fake invoices signed by Mr. Herrault. Yet the payments were telegraphed in monthly security committee meetings between officials at Lafarge headquarters and the Syrian affiliate, according to the internal inquiry and testimony by former executives. Minutes of the meetings were distributed to other Lafarge officials, including the chief executive, Mr. Lafont.

One memo dated Sept. 11, 2013, which was part of the court documents, described how ISIS’s growing presence had become a “main threat” to business. “It becomes more and more difficult to operate without being required to directly or indirectly negotiate with these networks classified as terrorist networks by international organizations and the USA,” the memo concluded.

Another security meeting memo, dated Oct. 15, 2013, described more blockages by ISIS, the Nusra Front and the Kurds, before noting that “negotiations with the various actors” had allowed the flow of supplies and employees to resume.

At checkpoints now held by ISIS and Nusra Front, the factory’s suppliers had only to mention “Lafarge” to pass, two employees told The Times, an account also given in their lawsuit. But workers still had to endure nerve-racking checks. “You were asked questions like, ‘Do you pray?’,” said Mr. Osman, the former information technology specialist. “It was a check to see if they will keep you alive, kill you or arrest you.”

On June 29, 2014, ISIS declared a caliphate in Syria and Iraq. The same day, the factory’s senior risk manager alerted his superiors in an email to a meeting he had set up with a “head of the Islamic State.” He wanted to ensure that Lafarge’s deals with the group would be maintained, according to the court documents.

Soon after, drivers bringing materials to and from the plant were handed new passes at ISIS checkpoints. At first, “it was a simple note from ISIS, written by hand,” said Mr. Osman, an account he also gave in accounts submitted to the court. “And then it became an official document that was already printed and had to be renewed and stamped every day,” he added. “The deal between ISIS and Lafarge became systematic.”

‘Move the Team Into the Tunnels’

Two weeks after ISIS declared its caliphate, the air rumbled from the sound of a distant blast. ISIS militants had detonated a truck bomb at a Turkish-owned cement plant.

Jarir Yahyaalmullaali, a former Lafarge employee at the cement factory in Syria, now lives in Urfa, Turkey. If workers had continued to wait at the plant, he said, “we would be dead by now.”CreditMonique Jaques for The New York Times

Lafarge temporarily halted production and told most workers to stay home, according to testimony by the former employees and executives. But local managers ordered an essential team of around 30 people, including Mr. Osman, to remain. By early August 2014, the Syrian partner, Mr. Tlass, claimed he had negotiated a new agreement with both ISIS and Kurdish militants that would allow the factory to resume production.

Lafarge continued the payments to ISIS through Mr. Tlass until the United Nations banned commercial and financial dealings with the group on Aug. 15, according to the internal review. Without the protection afforded by the payments, Mr. Lafont advised the executive board that the plant would need to close, probably in September.

It was still operating in the middle of September, as fighting in the region intensified. When ISIS assaults against Kurdish forces became more violent, villages near the plant began to empty out.

Local executives again ordered an essential team of about 30 workers to keep the plant running, and began sending others home. On Sept. 17, 2014, evacuation buses, a crucial piece of the company’s security plan, ferried nonessential workers back to Manbij.

But the buses never returned to the factory, as planned. Kurdish forces, occupied by the battle with ISIS, would not let them pass, according to testimony by Jean-Claude Veillard, head of safety operations at Lafarge in Paris.

The next day, Frédéric Jolibois, a new chief executive of Lafarge Syria who had recently taken the helm, emailed the plant’s supervisors a security plan that he had devised, according to a copy of the message included in court documents. The plan instructed plant managers to hide employees in a warren of tunnels beneath the factory if attacked. “Prepare mattresses, food, water, sugar in the electric tunnels of the factory,” Mr. Jolibois wrote in the email. “If attackers enter the factory, move the team into the tunnels and wait.”

The following morning, as the team gathered inside the plant, the factory’s doctor called to warn that ISIS was close. Dr. Basho said he had heard from the factory’s manager, who was supposed to be at the plant, but had fled earlier to take his family to safety in Turkey.

“If we had waited there, we would be dead by now,” said Mr. Yahyaalmullaali, the former warehouse keeper.

One morning, while Nidal Wahbi drove to work for Lafarge in Syria, a sniper’s bullet grazed his vehicle. “But the next day, you had to go through the same road, because Lafarge would ask why you didn’t go to work,” the former human resources manager said.CreditRoberto Frankenberg for The New York Times

LafargeHolcim, in its statement, said its internal investigation “showed that the safety of those on site was a constant concern of management and there was an evacuation plan in place.”

Amid the chaos, ISIS militants kidnapped two of Lafarge’s Christian employees, according to internal Lafarge documents and the internal review. They were released only after they agreed to convert to Islam and to attend religious courses.

Publicly, Lafarge painted a better picture of the dire event. The factory had been seized by ISIS, the company announced in a news release at the time, but Lafarge had succeeded in evacuating all of its remaining people.

But officials acknowledged to French investigators that the remaining Syrian employees had to flee on their own. Mr. Jolibois said Lafarge did not expect the situation to deteriorate so rapidly. “For what it’s worth, in another cement factory that didn’t belong to Lafarge, ISIS beheaded about 50 employees,” he told investigators.

In its statement to The Times, LafargeHolcim said Lafarge Syria “maintained its operations as long as the plant and its employees could remain secure.” It added that former employees were put on paid leave for more than 12 months after the closing of the site.

The money has not assuaged the Lafarge employees who believed they were scrambling to save their own lives in those final hours at the factory. Many were angered when Mr. Jolibois sent them an upbeat message shortly after the evacuation.

“Probably the things did not run perfectly or as good as planned, but nevertheless we achieved this key goal,” he wrote, according to an internal Lafarge email seen by The Times. “Lafarge Cement Syria is not dead. I am convinced that we will win the final battle.”

As a response, one of the survivors sent a follow-up email to Lafarge officials on behalf of other employees, denouncing Mr. Jolibois’s message as “full of lies.”

In it, the employees asked Lafarge to carry out an internal investigation into why workers were left to fend for themselves as ISIS advanced.

The employees said that the Lafarge officials never responded.

“The factory was the only thing they cared about,” Mr. Mohamad said. “But Lafarge should be a lesson for Western companies in foreign countries: They should treat people working for them like human beings.”

Liz Alderman and Elian Peltier reported from Paris, and Hwaida Saad from Lebanon.

]]>http://news.deconmit.com/business/isis-is-coming-how-a-french-company-pushed-the-limits-in-war-torn-syria.html/feed0When No Place Is Safe: Sheltering Under Siege in Syriahttp://news.deconmit.com/world/when-no-place-is-safe-sheltering-under-siege-in-syria.html
http://news.deconmit.com/world/when-no-place-is-safe-sheltering-under-siege-in-syria.html#commentsThu, 22 Feb 2018 03:23:30 +0000http://news.deconmit.com/world/when-no-place-is-safe-sheltering-under-siege-in-syria.html

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All of eastern Ghouta is underground.

That is how one aid worker described the situation as thousands of people fled into basements and makeshift shelters in the rebel-held suburb of Damascus this week.

Eastern Ghouta is under a brutal aerial assault by Syrian government forces that has left more than 200 people dead in recent days, including many children.

As the war on the outskirts of the capital reached a new level of intensity, families huddle underground. For hours on end, they wait out the bombing, which shows no signs of slowing.

The assault is the latest by President Bashar al-Assad’s forces on rebel-controlled areas in a seven-year civil war that has fractured the country.

In other cities and towns once held by rebel groups, like Aleppo and Daraya, the government has used a similar tactic of bombarding infrastructure and residential areas to force a surrender of fighters and the relocation of civilians. The Syrian government says that there are few civilians left in eastern Ghouta, and that those who remain are being held as human shields — an assertion disputed by international human rights groups and activists on the ground.

Footage from local activists shows women and children gathered in basements, playing and cooking to pass the time. Some share audio recordings of the planes and helicopters buzzing overhead, issuing desperate pleas on social media and WhatsApp.

In some parts of the sprawling suburb, the underground spaces are connected by tunnels. A local media activist, Firas Abdullah, filmed the scene as he made his way between the joined rooms on Wednesday.

“People here are hiding from the massive bombardment,” he says in the video as he ducks his head to walk through the tight space.

Mr. Abdullah, who has posted updates from the area for the past several years, said some women and children had been sheltering for more than 72 hours and were in need of food and water. He described the conditions as “grave.”

Local humanitarian groups have relayed the same information to international partners: The safest place to be is underground.

Sonia Khush, the Syria director for Save the Children, is based in Amman, Jordan, but has been working with local groups in eastern Ghouta for years. She said thousands of families hadspent most of the week holed up in basements to avoid the bombs.

“The fact is that people are in these basements and shelters, but it doesn’t even give them the mental comfort that they are going to be safe from these bombings,” Ms. Khush said. “Everyone is just terrified right now.”

While portions of the area have been subject to bombing since 2012, the recent surge of attacks is the worst there in years.

Above ground, hellish scenes are playing out. Footage posted on Monday by the Syrian Civil Defense, a group of emergency medical workers, showed people running for cover after a series of strikes.

Many see the basements as the only haven in a hostile environment. They had little chance to evacuate, as the area has been blockaded for months.

For Shadi Jad, a young father who has been in a basement since the beginning of the week, his shelter is a mixed blessing.

“Honestly, I feel the shelter is a grave, but it’s the only available way for protection,” he said when reached on Tuesday.

But Mr. Jad, who is hiding with his wife and eight other families, said that being in close quarters had also drawn his community together.

Another group of local media activists shared photos of a family huddled underground on Wednesday, baking bread in a stove.

CreditDamascus Media Center via Storyful

Aid groups warn that conditions in the shelters could quickly deteriorate. They lack ventilation, electricity, running water and bathroom facilities. The Unified Medical Office in Ghouta — a local aid group that works in the area — said that those conditions could lead to health problems like “respiratory diseases, lice and scabies.”

Even before the current bombardment, a United Nations report indicated that in some neighborhoods, the shelters had already become a public health concern.

But people have little choice.

Since Feb. 4, when the government’s offensive began, 346 civilians have been killed and 878 injured, mostly in airstrikes hitting residential areas, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Wednesday. Ninety-two of the deaths took place in one 13-hour period this week.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations’ top human rights official, called for an end to the violence in a statement on Wednesday.

“These are hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been trapped for over five years under siege, suffering deprivation of their most basic needs, and are now facing relentless bombing,” Mr. Hussein said. “How much cruelty will it take before the international community can speak with one voice to say enough dead children, enough wrecked families, enough violence, and take resolute, concerted action to bring this monstrous campaign of annihilation to an end?”

Hoda Khayti, 29, has lived in eastern Ghouta her whole life, and said her family, like most of their neighbors, had spent much of the week in a basement. Twelve other families joined them in one cramped space. They could hear planes constantly passing overhead.

“The scariest moments are when rockets land, then silence follows,” Ms. Khayti said when reached Wednesday on a Facebook video call. “We feel our souls are leaving our bodies when the plane gets close, and we feel relieved after it goes away.”

They fear the bombs outside, but like Mr. Jad, Ms. Khayti said the shelter has become a place for the community to come together.They share food, blankets and stories while they wait for the sounds of planes overhead to trail off.

“Mom comes back from the shelter with lot of stories, like this woman got married, that had a baby,” she said.

But Ms. Khayti is sometimes hesitant to head down to the basement, because she is scared of being trapped. Often, she stays above ground in the family home while her parents and sister head to the shelter.

“I don’t want to die in the basement,” Ms. Khayti said. “I saw a whole family die in the basement. That was last week.”

Megan Specia is a story editor on the International Desk, specializing in digital storytelling and breaking news. @meganspecia

JERUSALEM — Israel clashed with Syrian and Iranian military forces on Saturday in a series of audacious cross-border strikes that could mark a dangerous new phase in Syria’s long civil war.

The confrontations, which threaten to draw Israel more directly into the conflict, began before dawn when Israel intercepted what it said was an Iranian drone that had penetrated its airspace from Syria. The Israeli military then attacked what it called the command-and-control center from which Iran had launched the drone, at a Syrian air base near Palmyra.

On its way back from the mission, one of Israel’s F-16 fighter jets crashed in northern Israel after coming under heavy Syrian antiaircraft fire. It is believed to be the first Israeli plane lost under enemy fire in decades.

That prompted a broad wave of Israeli strikes against a dozen Syrian and Iranian targets in Syrian territory. The Israeli military said it hit eight Syrian targets, including three aerial defense batteries, and four Iranian positions that it described as “part of Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria.”

The events, including Israel’s direct engagement with Iranian forces, threatened to intensify the crisis in Syria and showed the extent to which the country has become a battlefield between Israel and Iran, bitter foes in the region.

“This is indeed a dangerous escalation that raises the specter of direct conflict between Israel and Iran in Syria — a far more serious situation than the drawing of red lines and tit-for-tat exchanges that have occurred before,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Forces from Russia, Turkey and the United States are also on the ground in Syria in a war with multiple fronts and multiple factions, including the remnants of the Islamic State and other Islamist militant groups.

Israel has long warned about the risk of conflict as Iranian forces and their allies, including Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group militia, have dug in on Syrian territory and approached the boundary with the Israeli-held portion of the Golan Heights. Israel, which considers Iran its most potent enemy in the region, has been lobbying world powers to push these forces from the border areas.

Israel has carried out scores of strikes in Syria in recent years, largely targeting what it says are advanced weapons stores or convoys taking weapons to Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon. Israel has also reportedly hit Syrian government facilities involved in weapons development and an Iranian base under construction in Syria.

But this was the first Israeli strike on a site where Iranian forces were present, analysts said, and Israeli military officials said this was the first time an Iranian drone had penetrated Israeli airspace during the Syrian war. There was no immediate indication that the drone was armed.

Israeli military officials accused the Syrians and Iranians of “playing with fire,” but indicated that Israel wanted to contain the situation.

“We are ready to exact a very heavy price from whoever acts against us,” said Brig. Gen. Ronen Manelis, the chief spokesman of the Israeli military, “but we are not seeking an escalation.”

The jet crash represented a severe blow to Israel’s prestige and could mark a major change after years in which it acted against targets in Syria with relative impunity.

In the past, Syria has claimed, falsely, that it had shot down Israeli aircraft. The last time an Israeli jet was downed under enemy fire appears to have been in the early 1980s.

Hezbollah said on Saturday that the downing of the Israeli F-16 jet by the Syrian Army marked the “start of a new strategic phase,” which would limit Israeli exploitation of Syrian airspace. “Today’s developments mean the old equations have categorically ended,” the Lebanese Shiite group said in a statement.

In Syria, the day’s events were viewed as potential game-changers. Government supporters celebrated in the streets of Damascus, handing out sweets and hailing Mr. Assad and the army.

This is the first time the Syrian government appears to have made good on promises to shoot down Israeli aircraft, after years of threats against both Israel and the other international militaries that have flown sorties over Syria without permission.

“I am so happy,” said Haidar, 30, a government supporter, as he handed out sweets downtown. “It makes me proud to see a Syrian response, shooting down the Israeli F-16. For years we have been waiting for a Syrian reaction against the Israeli violations and airstrikes.”

But just as Syrian self-confidence appears to have grown, Israel also sent a strong message with its broad wave of strikes on Saturday, Israeli analysts said. They noted that this was the first time in recent years Israel had struck Syrian territory in broad daylight and said that Israel had inflicted serious damage on Syria’s air-defense system. Despite more Syrian antiaircraft fire, all Israeli jets returned to base safely from the second mission, after the first jet was lost, according to the Israeli military. Syria is believed to have fired at least a dozen antiaircraft missiles, with the wreckage of one landing in Lebanon.

It was not immediately clear if the Israeli F-16 was directly hit by the Syrian antiaircraft fire. Early assessments suggested that it was, said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, another spokesman for the Israeli military, though he added that nothing had been officially confirmed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spent much of Saturday in consultations with his defense minister, the Israeli chief of staff and other military officials.

Russia, along with Iran, has been helping prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and the Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement calling on “all sides involved to show restraint and avoid all acts that could lead to complicating the situation further.”

The ministry added: “It is absolutely unacceptable to create threats to the lives and security of Russian soldiers that are in the Syrian Arab Republic on the invitation of the legal government to assist in the fight against terrorism.”

After a meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin in Moscow two weeks ago, Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement that Israel viewed with “utmost gravity” Iran’s efforts to establish a military presence in Syria, and said he had made clear to Mr. Putin that Israel would “act according to need.”

Mr. Netanyahu said he spoke with Mr. Putin on Saturday and agreed that security coordination between the two countries would continue. The Israeli prime minister also said he spoke with Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson about Saturday’s confrontation.

“The United States is deeply concerned about today’s escalation of violence over Israel’s border,” Heather Nauert, a State Department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “Iran’s calculated escalation of threat, and its ambition to project its power and dominance, places all the people of the region — from Yemen to Lebanon — at risk.”

A Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Adrian J. Rankine-Galloway, said the United States military supported Israel’s right of self-defense. “We share the concerns of many throughout the region that Iran’s destabilizing activities threaten international peace and security, and we seek greater international resolve in countering Iran’s malign activities,” Major Rankine-Galloway said in a statement.

With so many foreign forces engaged in Syria, the risks of the conflict extending beyond its borders are real, but analysts said all sides have an interest in making sure Saturday’s events do not spiral into something larger.

“I think it will be contained for the moment,” said Steven Simon, a Middle East specialist at Amherst College who was a senior official on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council. “But the situation is highly volatile,” Mr. Simon said, adding, “this has been simmering for quite a while and things are coming to a boil.”

Mr. Simon said an important question is whether the White House is counseling restraint.

“The U.S. and Israel could be thinking of their respective operations in Syria as a hammer and anvil, with Iran and its proxy forces in the middle,” he said. “If true, fighting will escalate.”

Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence and now the executive director of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, said Syria, Iran and Russia would appear to have little interest now in getting into a full-blown conflict with Israel.

“Israel has the capability to destroy the Russian and Iranian project to save the Assad regime,” Mr. Yadlin said. “This is not the weak Syrian opposition. This is strong Israel.”

While Israel’s military strength is a significant factor in any response, the improving situation for the Assad government is also a consideration.

“There is no incentive for the Iranians, Syrians or Russians to draw the Israelis into a military situation that has been moving in their favor for some time,” said Stephen B. Slick, a former C.I.A. station chief in Israel who now directs the Intelligence Studies Project at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry denied the drone had strayed into Israeli airspace and rejected as “laughable” reports that Israel had intercepted a drone launched from Syria.

Syrian Army officials said the drone had been carrying out a routine mission against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, over Syrian airspace, according to the news site Al-Manar.

Colonel Conricus insisted that the drone was “on a specific Iranian mission,” and was shot down deep in Israeli territory.

Still, some Israeli analysts did not discount the possibility that the Iranian drone had crossed into Israel because of a malfunction.

“I fail to see the logic behind the Iranians sending a drone to Israel,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israeli television analyst of Arab affairs and an Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “They have other priorities right now in Syria.”

But once it had crossed into Israeli airspace, the Israelis had no choice but to respond, Mr. Yaari said.

He added, “The almost constant friction between the Iranian presence in Syria and the Israeli Army is taking its toll.”

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Nada Homsi from Beirut; Rod Nordland from Tal Abyad, Syria; Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran; Ivan Nechepurenko from Moscow; and an employee of The New York Times from Damascus, Syria.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Loses Jet And Then Hits At Iran in Syria. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe